Removing all LOD from the game...?

[Deleted2770933User]

One thing that really is not up to scratch in Witcher 3, is the poor poor quality LODs. So I was wondering....what would happen if we simply remove LODs and force the full textures to always be loaded?

I know this will impact game performance, but is it possible to do?

 

If someone knows if and how this can be achieved, I would love to know!

[KoticR]

Texture LODing is done through mipmaps and by setting streaming distances. Usually in other games it's enough to set the TextureMips to something like -1 to disable the usage of any stored mips so that the engine always uses the highest possible resolution. However this seems to be slightly different for the Witcher3, in 1.04 they introduced a setting called "TextureMipBias" which can be altered in a range from 0 (default) to -1.0(used on Ultra Settings) and according to the nVidia Performance Guide up to -2.0.

 

Another setting is the StreamingDistance for certain assets, in the Witcher3 there are 3 different settings under [Rendering]. One is called "TextureStreamingCharacterDistanceLimit" (default = 50) which supposedly controls the distance at which character BODIES are streamed in (this value crashed my game at 200). The next one is "TextureStreamingHeadsDistanceLimit" (default = 10) which supposedly controls the distance at which character HEADS are streamed in (this value crashed my game at 150) i suggest setting it to the same value as "TextureStreamingCharacterDistanceLimit" since otherwise you see people without heads in the distance. The "last" one is "TextureStreamingDistanceLimit" (default = 40000) and i guess this controls the overall texture streaming distance for environment assets like terrain, trees, foliage and so forth.

One note here: It seems that the first two settings also control if a mesh (model) is shown or not, since when i set TextureStreamingCharacterDistanceLimit=10 and TextureStreamingHeadsDistanceLimit=50 i see a lot of characters running around with no body.

 

One more setting that seems to be worth noting is the TextureMemoryBudget (default = 800) i'm not quite sure if the 800 refers to the amount of vram the game is allowed to use for textures who shouldn't be streamed in like Geralt's textures or if it is some general memory budget value that game can use. Increasing it seems to have no effect for me in terms of visual quality.

 

I hope it's not to messy to read but besides the general texture resolution those are the settings that control the texture quality in the game. I'm not quite sure about Mesh LODs since i haven't found any setting that controls them. But they used simplygon for that so if you really want to sink your teeth in that topic you can always head over to the Docs from Simplygon but i doubt that you will find anything useful there since it's more about the general implementation and API.

 

Have a good one. :)

[Deleted2770933User]

Thanks for explaining in so much detail. Makes more sense to me now and I will definitely NOT be meddling in this any further! ;)